Online transformation challenges are one of the most powerful ways to gain new clients and build up a following for your online fitness business. But getting started can be a bit of a challenge if you’ve never run an online challenge before.
Have no fear, I have been running online and in-person transformation challenges for a few years now and have learned a lot through trial and error. Below I am going to give you a few tips that will help you run a successful and profitable online transformation challenge.
Decide on the Details
Deciding on the details of your challenge is probably the most important step of setting up your online transformation challenge. Some of the things you need to decide on are:
Timelines
When do you want to start the challenge? How long are you going to run it for? How long before the start of the challenge are you going to start marketing your challenge? (I have personally found two weeks before to be a good length of time)
Niche
Who are you going to target with your challenge? What problem do you want to solve? This will help you once it comes to marketing your challenge.
Price
How much are you going to charge for your challenge? You will need to choose a price that will work best for your business and your customers based on what you are offering.
What does your challenge include?
Decide what your challenge is going to include? Workouts? Meal plan? Access to a private Facebook group? Phone calls? Email check-ins? Etc. This will also help you determine how much to charge.
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Check Your Profit Margins
While you should make sure to think about the price of your challenge while laying out the details, I can’t stress enough how important it is to accurately price your transformation challenge.
Getting them set up and monitoring your challengers’ progress takes time and effort, and you need to be compensated for that adequately. While a challenge might not include all the “fixings” of normal personal training, just like you would for other online fitness services, make sure you’re setting a price that covers your time and makes the challenge both appealing to clients and worthwhile to you.
If you’re really stuck on pricing, do some competitor research or lean on your professional network to ask what has worked for them and what hasn’t.
Once you have your price, think about how many people you expect to sign up and do some quick math. Are you happy with that figure? If yes, great! If no, what can you do to fix that?
Create a Marketing Plan
Once you’ve got your details squared off, it’s time to start promoting the transformation challenge. This is the second most important step to setting up your online transformation challenge because you need people to sign up and pay you!
There are so many ways to market your transformation to the public. You will have to look at all the different options and decide what will work best and be the most cost-effective for your business.
Start with your current customers
The best place to start is by talking about the upcoming challenge with your current clients and on your social media channels. This will begin to get people interested and will create some buzz until you are actually ready to open registration for the challenge.
Go social
Once you have chosen a date to open registration and start your hard push marketing, go all in with transformation pictures of past clients, use video to talk about it, go live on social, and ensure you have attractive graphics to share on social media to grab attention. If you are familiar with paid adds on social media, you can look at that as an option also.
Avoid overselling
The most important key is to talk about it enough to get people interested, without being too “selly” and annoying them. One thing I have found to get people to commit is to offer an early bird registration for a limited amount of time to a limited amount of people to get the ball rolling. People often take their time before making a purchase that requires effort on their part. If you create a sense of urgency with either a limited number of spots open in your challenge or the early bird pricing, people will be more likely to pull the trigger.
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Launch the Transformation Challenge
When it’s time to start your challenge, make sure you have systems in place to make your life easier.
What happens when someone signs up? How soon before the start of the challenge will they receive their challenge package? How often are you going to check-in with challengers or post in a private challenge group? You should decide all of this beforehand so that everything will run smoothly and so both you and your challengers know what to expect.
I use Trainerize to run all of my challenges because it’s really easy to build training plans and workouts as well as upload meal plans all into the client’s app. Instead of creating private Facebook groups for the challengers, I use the groups feature in Trainerize to get everyone chatting and motivating each other.
Clients feel more connected because they can either private message me through their Trainerize app, or they can shoot a message to the group with any questions they might have.
Do What Was Promised
Once you have paying clients signed up for your challenge and they are on their way, make sure you deliver everything you promised to them before they signed up. Especially, if this is your first ever challenge, you want these people to be successful and you want to come out of it with some great testimonials and transformation pictures.
If you promised daily posts about challenger accomplishments or weekly video check-ins, make sure that happens! Even if you only have five people sign up for your first challenge, use it as a learning experience. Just deliver (or over deliver) what was promised to these five people to ensure their success.
Take Notes
If you have never run a challenge you will learn a lot from your first online transformation challenge. Taking notes throughout the process will help you remember all the things you would do differently in the next challenge. You will always find somewhere you can improve for the next one so don’t worry too much if your list of notes starts getting a little long. Everyone has to start somewhere and the only place to go is up!